https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/1680.pdf

Talent management: A critical review

Wives' Employment and the Division of Family Work Basic Patterns of Family Work and Paid Work Paid Work, Sex, and Sex Role Ideology as Determinants of Family Work Wives' Desire for Greater Husband Participation in Family Work The Consequences of Role Overload Husbands' Psychological Involvement in Work and Family Husbands' and Wives' Roles The Issues Today

Working Wives, Working Husbands

Flexibility programs have become widespread in the United States, but their use has not. According to a recent study, 79% of companies say they allow some of their employees, and 37% officially allow all or most of their employees, to periodically change starting or quitting times (Galinsky, Bond, & Sakai, 2008). Although researchers often regard the official availability of flexibility and other work–life policies as an indicator of an organization’s responsiveness to employees’ work–life concerns (Davis & Kalleberg, 2006), having policies on the books does not always mean that workers feel comfortable using these policies (Blair-Loy, Wharton, & Goodstein, 2011). Studies that have assessed usage rates generally find that usage rates are low. This has proved a remarkably resilient problem. The basic forms of workplace flexibility have been around for decades: flextime, part-time schedules, compressed workweeks, job shares (Friedman, n.d.). Yet usage of these programs

Cultural Schemas, Social Class, and the Flexibility Stigma

Locating work–life balance discourse in time and place
The huge recent growth in attention to ‘work–life balance’(WLB) dilemmas in academic, political, professional and popular literature might give the impression that this is, at best, a new area of concern, or at worst, a passing fad. This would, however, be
misleading. The WLB metaphor is a social construct located within a particular period of time and originating in a Western context, but dilemmas relating to the management of
paid work alongside other parts of life, especially family, have been the focus of research for several decades (see, e.g., Rapoport and Rapoport, 1965). Research on this topic has always reflected social, economic and workplace developments and concerns, shifting in response to new trends. For example, as the numbers of women entering the labour force grew, from the 1960s, research in certain contexts tended to focus on ‘working mothers’
or dual earner families, while concerns about stress and burnout associated with workplace changes in the 1980s and 1990s were reflected in research and debate about work–family conflict (Lewis and Cooper, 1999). The terminology used to refer to these issues continues to evolve in response to current concerns. In particular, a shift from
‘work–family’ and ‘family-friendly policies’ with their implicit focus on women, especially mothers, to ‘work–life’, the precursor of the more recent ‘work–life balance’
(WLB) discourse began in the 1990s. This linguistic shift reflected a broader and more inclusive way of framing the debate to engage men and women with and without children
or other caring commitments and was partly a response to backlash against work–family policies by those without obvious family obligations.

The constraints of a ‘work–life balance’ approach: an international perspective

Many employing organizations have adopted work-family policies, programs, and benefits. Yet managers in employing organizations simply do not know what organizational initiatives actually reduce work-family conflict and how these changes are likely to impact employees and the organization. We examine scholarship that addresses two broad questions: first, do work-family initiatives reduce employees' work-family conflict and/or improve work-family enrichment? Second, does reduced work-family conflict improve employees' work outcomes and, especially, business outcomes at the organizational level? We review over 150 peer-reviewed studies from a number of disciplines in order to summarize this rich literature and identify promising avenues for research and conceptualization. We propose a research agenda based on four primary conclusions: the need for more multi-level research, the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach, the benefits of longitudinal studies that employ quasi-experimental or experimental designs and the challenges of translating research into practice in effective ways.

/pdf/getting-there-from-here-research-on-the-effects-of-work-2jpjwfczbp.pdf

Getting There from Here: Research on the Effects of Work-Family Initiatives on Work-Family Conflict and Business Outcomes.

We conducted a laboratory study examining the effect of a family conflict with work on performance appraisal ratings given to men and women. Overall, the experience of a family conflict was associated with lower performance ratings, and ratee sex moderated this relationship. Men who experienced a family conflict received lower overall performance ratings and lower reward recommendations than men who did not, whereas ratings of women were unaffected by the experience of a family conflict. The sex bias was not evident when performance was evaluated on the more specific dimension of planning. Neither rater gender nor work-family role attitudes moderated the sex bias. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

What is acceptable for women may not be for men: The effect of family conflicts with work on job-performance ratings

J. N. Cleveland and K. R. Murphy (1992) suggested that phenomena such as rater errors and interrater disagreements could be understood in terms of differences in the goals pursued by various raters. We measured 19 rating goals of students at the beginning of a semester, grouped them into scales, and correlated these with teacher evaluations collected at the end of the semester. We found significant multiple correlations, both within classes and in an analysis of the pooled sample (adjusting for instructor mean differences, incremental R2 =.08). Measures of rating goals obtained after raters had observed a significant proportion of ratee performance accounted for variance (incremental R2 =.07) not accounted for by measures of goals obtained at the beginning of the semester.

Raters who pursue different goals give different ratings.

We report on the use of scenario-based methods for evaluating collaborative systems. We describe the method, the case study where it was applied, and provide results of its efficacy in the field. The results suggest that scenario-based evaluation is effective in helping to focus evaluation efforts and in identifying the range of technical, human, organizational and other contextual factors that impact system success. The method also helps identify specific actions, for example, prescriptions for design to enhance system effectiveness. However, we found the method somewhat less useful for identifying the measurable benefits gained from a CSCW implementation, which was one of our primary goals. We discuss challenges faced applying the technique, suggest recommendations for future research, and point to implications for practice.

Situating evaluation in scenarios of use

Evaluating collaborative systems remains a significant challenge. Most evaluation methods approach the problem from one of two extremes: focused evaluation of specific system features, or broad ethnographic investigations of system use in context. In this paper, we develop and demonstrate a middle ground for evaluation: explicit reflections on scenarios of system use coupled with analysis of the consequences of these use scenarios, represented as claims. Extending prior work in scenario-based design and claims analysis, we develop a framework for a multi-perspective, multi-level evaluation of collaborative systems called SWIMs: scenario walkthrough and inspection methods. This approach is centered on the capture, aggregation, and analysis of users' reflections on system support for specific scenarios. We argue that this approach not only provides the contextual sensitivity and use centricity of ethnographic techniques, but also sufficient structure for method replication, which is common to more feature-based evaluation techniques. We demonstrate with an extensive field study how SWIMs can be used for summative assessment of system performance and organizational contributions, and formative assessment to guide system and feature re-design. Results from the field study provide preliminary indications of the method's effectiveness and suggest directions for future research.

Scenario-Based Methods for Evaluating Collaborative Systems

In this paper we describe a collaborative environment created to support distributed evaluation of a complex system architecture. The approach couples an interactive architecture browser with collaborative walkthroughs of an evolving architectural representation. The collaborative architecture browser was created to facilitate involvement of project stakeholders from geographically dispersed, heterogeneous organizations. The paper provides a rationale for the approach, describes the system created to facilitate distributed-collaborative architecture evaluation, and reports on evaluation results from an ongoing, very-large scale application integration project with the United States Marine Corps. The paper contributes to research on early architecture requirements engineering, architecture evaluation, and software tools to support distributed-collaborative design.

Amie L. Skattebo

Papers

What is acceptable for women may not be for men: The effect of family conflicts with work on job-performance ratings

Raters who pursue different goals give different ratings.

Situating evaluation in scenarios of use

Scenario-Based Methods for Evaluating Collaborative Systems

Collaborative architecture design and evaluation